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Ray Tracing in One Weekend Book Series

RT in One Weekend RT The Next Week RT The Rest of Your Life
In One Weekend The Next Week The Rest of Your Life

Getting the Books

The Ray Tracing in One Weekend series of books are now available to the public for free directly from the web.

We are currently hosting both the older v3.2.3 version and the latest v4.0.0-alpha.2 versions in the same project. The older v3 version (really v3.2.3) is provided for readers who are in the middle of going through the series so you can maintain continuity. For new readers, or readers newly starting one of the books, we strongly recommend that you jump aboard the v4 train.

Version 3.2.3

Version 4.0.0-alpha.2

These books have been formatted for both screen and print. For more information about printing your own copies, or on getting PDFs of the books, see PRINTING.md for more information.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute a PR please read our contribution guidelines first.

Project Status

Ok, v4.0.0-alpha.2 is finally out the door, and we are now heads down on getting the final v4.0.0 version complete and shipped by SIGGRAPH 2024, July 28. At present, that means we are largely focused on Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life — the third book in the series.

v4.0.0-alpha.2 is released. Books one and two are largely complete, and we're now focusing on book three. You can find it at the regular spot: https://raytracing.github.io. We are temporarily preserving the final version of v3.2.3 inside the repo, so you can just grab the latest and reference both versions.

If you'd like to check out the latest updates and watch our progress, we're on the dev branch. You can also browse our release backlog to see what we're planning. Our relevant milestones are

If you're interested in contributing, email us! You can find our contact info at the head of each book. Or just start a new discussion or issue.

GitHub Discussions

Do you have general questions about raytracing code, issues with your own implmentation, or general raytracing ideas you'd like to share? Check out our GitHub discussions forum!

Directory Structure

The organization of this repository is meant to be simple and self-evident at a glance:

  • books/ -- This folder contains the three raytracing books (in HTML), and some supporting material.

  • images/ -- Contains all of the images and figures of the books. Can also be used to compare your results.

  • style/ -- Contains the css for the books and the site.

  • src/ -- Contains the source.

  • src/<book>/ -- Contains the final source code for each book.

  • v3/ -- All content (same general structure) for the v3.2.3 release (from December 2020).

  • v3/common -- Contains v3 headers that are common to two or more v3 books. This is also where external headers are stored.

Source Code

Intent

This repository is not meant to act as its own tutorial. The source is provided so you can compare your work when progressing through the book. We strongly recommend reading and following along with the book to understand the source. Ideally, you'll be developing your own implementation as you go, in order to deeply understand how a raytracer works.

Downloading The Source Code

The GitHub home for this project contains all source and documentation associated with the Ray Tracing in One Weekend book series. To clone or download the source code, see the green "Clone or download" button in the upper right of the project home page.

Programming Language

This book is written in C++, and uses some modern features of C++11. The language and features were chosen to be broadly understood by the largest collection of programmers. It is not meant to represent ideal (or optimized) C++ code.

Implementations in Other Languages

The Ray Tracing in One Weekend series has a long history of implementations in other programming languages (see Implementations in Other Languages), and across different operating systems. Feel free to add your own implementation to the list!

Branches

In general, ongoing development, with all of the latest changes, can be found in the dev branch, which may contain patch, minor and major changes, depending on the release in progress. We try to keep CHANGELOG.md up to date, so you can easily browse what's new in each development branch. We may from time to time use additional development branches, so stay up to date by reviewing the CONTRIBUTING page.

The release branch contains the latest released (and live) assets. This is the branch from which GitHub pages serves up https://raytracing.github.io/.

Building and Running

Copies of the source are provided for you to check your work and compare against. If you wish to build the provided source, this project uses CMake. To build, go to the root of the project directory and run the following commands to create the debug version of every executable:

$ cmake -B build
$ cmake --build build

You should run cmake -B build whenever you change your project CMakeLists.txt file (like when adding a new source file).

You can specify the target with the --target <program> option, where the program may be inOneWeekend, theNextWeek, theRestOfYourLife, or any of the demonstration programs. By default (with no --target option), CMake will build all targets.

$ cmake --build build --target inOneWeekend

Optimized Builds

CMake supports Release and Debug configurations. These require slightly different invocations across Windows (MSVC) and Linux/macOS (using GCC or Clang). The following instructions will place optimized binaries under build/Release and debug binaries (unoptimized and containing debug symbols) under build/Debug:

On Windows:

$ cmake -B build
$ cmake --build build --config Release  # Create release binaries in `build\Release`
$ cmake --build build --config Debug    # Create debug binaries in `build\Debug`

On Linux / macOS:

# Configure and build release binaries under `build/Release`
$ cmake -B build/Release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ cmake --build build/Release

# Configure and build debug binaries under `build/Debug`
$ cmake -B build/Debug -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
$ cmake --build build/Debug

We recommend building and running the Release version (especially before the final render) for the fastest results, unless you need the extra debug information provided by the (default) debug build.

CMake GUI on Windows

You may choose to use the CMake GUI when building on windows.

  1. Open CMake GUI on Windows
  2. For "Where is the source code:", set to location of the copied directory. For example, C:\Users\Peter\raytracing.github.io.
  3. Add the folder "build" within the location of the copied directory. For example, C:\Users\Peter\raytracing.github.io\build.
  4. For "Where to build the binaries", set this to the newly-created "build" directory.
  5. Click "Configure".
  6. For "Specify the generator for this project", set this to your version of Visual Studio.
  7. Click "Done".
  8. Click "Configure" again.
  9. Click "Generate".
  10. In File Explorer, navigate to build directory and double click the newly-created .sln project.
  11. Build in Visual Studio.

If the project is succesfully cloned and built, you can then use the native terminal of your operating system to simply print the image to file.

Running The Programs

You can run the programs by executing the binaries placed in the build directory:

$ build\Debug\inOneWeekend > image.ppm

or, run the optimized version (if you compiled with the release configuration):

$ build\Release\inOneWeekend > image.ppm

The generated PPM file can be viewed directly as a regular computer image, if your operating system supports this image type. If your system doesn't handle PPM files, then you should be able to find PPM file viewers online. We like ImageMagick.

Corrections & Contributions

If you spot errors, have suggested corrections, or would like to help out with the project, please review the CONTRIBUTING document for the most effective way to proceed.